Why don't Fundamentalist schools...

[elder999]

We need training in compassion because it does not, for the most part, come to us naturally. The ancient Greeks knew this. Every year, on the festival of Dionysus, Athenian citizens watched tragedies written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and other play wrights. It was a course in empathy. Suffering was put on stage, and the audience was able to weep for people whom they normally would have considered beyond the pale.

These tragedies were part of a religious festival; they were designed to make the audience extend their sympathy to people such as Oedipus, who murdered his father and had incestuous relations with his mother, or Heracles, who in a fit of divinely inspired madness killed his wife and children. These powerful dramas gave people a liberating purification of the emotions that helped transform the horror and disgust inspired by these human tragedies into compassion. We need to find similarly imaginative ways to educate people today.

The history of each faith tradition represents a ceaseless struggle between our inherent tendency to aggression and the mitigating virtue of compassion. Religiously inspired hatred has caused unimaginable suffering around the world. But secularism has had its failures too. Auschwitz, the Gulag, and the regime of Saddam Hussein show the fearful cruelty to which humanity is prone when all sense of the sacred has been lost.

None of these atrocities could have taken place if people were properly educated in the simplest of all principles, the golden rule. We live in one world, and we have to learn to reach out in sympathy to people who have different opinions, at home and abroad. We need the compassionate ethic more desperately than ever before. I find it sad and distressing that so many so-called “Christians” in my country seem to have forgotten all about it.

 

[heretic888]

The link between sucharguments and those of, say, Pat Robertson is that they all insist that humanism, liberalism, whatever, is just another religion, neither more nor less biased than fundamentalisms.

Logical Fallacy: Guilt By Association
Logical Fallacy: Straw Man

Please supply examples of liberal humanists banning books, firing teachers for their refusal to adhere to dogma, or assorted witch-burnings. For that matter, please supply examples of Christian liberals (yes, there is a very, very long list of them) such as Jimmy Carter trying such things. For THAT matter, please supply evidence that your definitions of such terms as, fundamentalist," and, "liberal," are more than yours and yours alone.

Logical Fallacy: Appeal To Ridicule
Logical Fallacy: Burden Of Proof
Logical Fallacy: Begging The Question
Logical Fallacy: Special Pleading
Logical Fallacy: Straw Man

What fundamentalism shares with Jung is the erasure of history and the collapse of culture difference. In all three, "history," becomes simply the unfolding of God's plan, or the mere repetition of some such thing as, "spirituality," or, "evil;" individual experience simply slumps down into the expression of some vast Underlying Plan and Pattern.

Logical Fallacy: Appeal To Consequences Of A Belief
Logical Fallacy: Appeal to Ridicule
Logical Fallacy: Genetic Fallacy
Logical Fallacy: Guilt By Association
Logical Fallacy: Straw Man

*sigh*

 

[rmcrobertson]

Well, I can agree in two ways: first, that the Golden Rule certainly wouldn't hurt nobody; second, that the twentieth-century example of Germany is the sort of horror to make anybody wonder seriously about rationalism.

It's one of the reasons I approve of Freud: the exposure of the ruse of reason in all its disguises, the reminder of the return of the repressed, that sort of thing.

However--and leaving out the obvious fact that Christianity and other religions have a lot to answer for in the catalogue of the world's horrors--it's also true that Auschwitz, the Gulag, and Hussein ran on religious fantasy and hatred, and were linked by anti-semitism and the persecution of religious minorities.

I'd put the problem like this: we don't really know what a liberal and rationalist society would be like, because nobody's ever really tried them. Again, it's a reason to admire Freud--who identified politics, along with teaching and psychoanalysis, as the impossible professions.

 

[heretic888]

"Auschwitz is not the product of rationality. Auschwitz is the result of the many products of rationality being used in irrational ways. Auschwitz is rationality hijacked by tribalism."
- Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit

"We are nowhere near the Millennium. In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the 'edge of history'. There would be a real New Age."
- Ken Wilber, Up from Eden

"There is more spirituality in reason's denial of God than there is in myth's affirmation of God, precisely because there is more depth... even an 'atheist' acting from rational-universal compassion is more spiritual than a fundamentalist acting to convert the universe in the name of a mythic-membership god."
- Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Laterz.

 

[Rich Parsons]

Just to take up one point showing why I'm not going to bother to read through the collected works of Ken Wilber:

persona
/person/

• noun (pl. personas or personae /personee/) 1 Psychoanalysis the aspect of a person’s character that is presented to or perceived by others. Compare with ANIMA. 2 a role or character adopted by an author or actor.

— ORIGIN Latin, ‘mask, character played by an actor’.

This comes from "The Compact Oxford English Dictionary," but hey, what would THEY know.

As for fundamentalism, the question--as it would be in other schools--is the refusal to tolerate anything unorthodox. That's the fundamental difference between them and humanist, liberal public schools: humanist and liberal schools, by definition, have an investment in the heterodox.

Mr. Robertson,

So, I guess it is ok not to have read all of the same books you have read as well?

As to the Dictionary, I have quoted it many times myself and been slamed by those who are using some other defintion either from the local time period or from and sunsect of the culture. Yet, like you said, what does the dictionary know about the meaning of a word.

Peace
:asian:

 

[Kane]

Rmcrobertson, by examining your posts I notice one big thing. You bash other religions and belief systems and try to justify it one what happened hundreds of years ago. To my knowledge there hasn't been a witch burning since earlier colonial times unless it was between some cult. You also seem to use events from the passed to justify your belief of affirmative action. Slavery from a century and a half ago doesn't justify discrimination against white men or Asian men. Honestly stop looking to the past. Why does any race have to pay on what happened centuries ago and why do you have to eternally stamp religious folk as bigots on what happen 500 years ago with the Spanish inquisition and what not.

Realize that we live in the 21st century and that we shouldn't keep grudges on what happened centuries ago.

 

[rmcrobertson]

OK, cranky me time.

1. I see there was no truth to my claim that anybody was relying fundamentally on Ken Wilber's writings and ideas for everything.

2. Why no, Mr. Parsons. People are only allowed to read what I say they should read. But it did seem that the best way to resolve the argument over what words such as, "fundamentalist," meant would be to look at at least the sort version of the OED. More politely, the nice thing about the full OED is its documentation of the evolution, and the different employments, of a word. There is a great book on the making of the OED called I think "The Madman and the Professor," which has a beautifully applicable story to tell about the presence of madness in the heart of reason.

3. I'm not surprised that the flip side of the belief in the possibility of perfect rationality would be the belief in archetypes. Personally, I prefer a sort of Freudo-Marxisto-feminsitoid-greenish--post-colonial Lamont Cranstonish awareness of the weirdness that lurks in the heart of men. And women too.

 

[arnisador]

Logical Fallacy: Thinking I care about all these links to someone's site about Logical Fallacies.

 

[arnisador]

OK, cranky me time.

"And now for something completely different..."

 

[rmcrobertson]

I am NOT normally cranky, you tool of phallologocentric capitalism!

Wait a minute--that sounds too much like my normal posts to be funny....

 

[elder999]

Now, on to more relevant discussions...



Yes. But, you see, the "Gospels" are all we know about "Jesus Christ". If you're going to go around claiming the man (who probably never even existed) was a symbol for all things Semitic, it helps to have his source material back this up.

I certainly didn't claim him as "a symbol for all things Semitic.."

What we know about pre-canonical Christianity was that is most assuredly was not centered in Israel. In fact, its practically non-existent in the "Promised Land" during the first two or so centuries CE. The movement(s) abound(s), however, in places like Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, and even Rome.

Connecting Christianity with any concrete "archaelogical record" is, also, about as "sketchy" as it gets.



Actually, it wasn't that as much as it was a matter of verbatim copies from extant sources (like, say, Plato's writings about Socrates). These weren't the same "ideas", they were almost exactly the same words.


The major "Semitic" influence on Christianity was one of cultural backdrop and context. The philosophy and metaphysic itself is Platonic through and through (especially in Paul's letters).

Laterz.

Okay-it's like this.

I make some cookies: flour, eggs, sugar, and whatnot.

WHat makes them "cookies?" The flour,the eggs, the sugar or the "whatnot?"

Thy're certainly not cookies without any one of those things, but they're not any one of those things, either.

It's the same with "Christianity." In fact, Christianity is a "chocolate-chip cookie," and Judaism is the "chocolate chip."

It may be a cookie without the chocolate chips, but it's not a chocolate chip cookie, either, no matter how much you may insist otherwise.

As for the archaelogical record, during the second and third centuries there were groups of Baptists (an almost altogether Semitic ritual bathing ) found in the district between the Tigris and Euphrates acknowledging Christian teachings among severe beliefs with the stamp of Jewish influence. They presumably began as a splinter group from Jewish settlers, and they were at that time an old sect that traced their teaching back to the heretical prophet Elchesai, who taught in Mesopotamia c 100-110 A.D.

More tellingly, there are ancient "church houses," or their archeaological remains, complete with ritual baths and Christian graffiti dating from the first century A.D., to be found in Palestine, especially in the region around the Sea of Galilee, in the village and later city of Capernaum, for instance.

Lastly, the churches earliest and even present teachings on sexuality and especially what has come to be mis-called "homosexuality," are almost wholly Jewish in origin, and surely not the product of a culture that embraced, or, at the very least, turned a blind eye toward homosexual behavior.

Again, I'd commend your reading choices, and suggest you move a little further down the shelf. Start with the unsurpassed The Early Church, by H. Chadwick.

 

[heretic888]

Ah, very interesting, elder999.

I should mention at this point a clarification on my position that I feel wasn't expressed clearly enough in the past. In no way am I maintaining that "Christianity" was solely an invention of the "Gentiles". It most clearly has roots in Judaic sources (most likely, the Therapeutae of Alexandria and Essenes of Jersulem). But, rather, that the principal ethic ("the letter killeth", "the Law has been surpassed"), lifestyle ("give up one's family, friends, and possessions to follow the Way"), terminology ("Logos", "the Only-Begotten", "Savior", "Liberator"), main rite ("consume my blood and flesh to live eternally"), and means of transcendence ("I live no longer the Christ lives in me", "psychic" vs "pnemautic" Christians) seem to point to a neo-Platonic religious complex.

Inevitably, though, this complex was a syncretism of Jewish mysticism (perhaps a precursor to Kabbalah) and Platonic-Hermetic mysticism --- as shown by, say, the Therapeutae, Philo Judaeus, the Essenes, and so on.

Albeit I myself am a bit suspicious as to the claims of "Christian graffiti". I shall perhaps look at this book myself.

Laterz.